Thank goodness for country veterinarians:)

Well the girl has been diagnosed and fixed. By thursday she still wasn't any better and her crop wasn't going down after me working on it for days, so I figured something else was the issue and called the vet. I took her in right away and he smeared a sample of poo and knew what it was right away, coccidia. Easily treated with a few days of Albon, which when I watched him shove it down her throat, I wasn't sure I would be able to do it. Well I did and its no big deal, it is a big pill though. I put a zip tie on her ankle so I knew which one she was, since she has 2 sisters who look identical. Today will be her last pill and she's acting just like a 'normal' chicken now so I think we are all good!

In other news we went to the Rogers Flea market on Friday with the plants and gourds. Sold a lot of plants which makes me feel better because I just dont want them to go to waste and I really dont want to have to till to plant them, but we will if we have to and then just sell the tomatoes at the farmers market. I put the rest of the plants at the end of the drive and husband put up huge signs at the end of our road. We've been doing good with that too, I think we have about 40 dollars now, which is another 40 plants to good homes. 

Beautiful tuesday evening

After the sadness of losing one of the girls a couple weeks ago I just about fell over when I seen another one of the hens sitting still on the ground in the run. Well, its been two days and i'm not so sure whats wrong with her yet but i'm working on it. She may be having problems with her crop, which is a sack all of their food goes into before it moves on down the line. Once I figure it out completely I will update on what that is. As for the time being she is comfy in a cage on the porch until I can see if she lays an egg or what the heck ever.

Heres a doozy for you, this egg was inside of a whole other shell! When I pulled it apart it looked like it may have been 2 shells and then the whole egg. Weird.

Now for some of todays goings on, just some random pictures of the garden.

Heres a nice close up of lucy. 

Frank, the worlds worst housed cat.

Lettuce

Fresh salad, greens and eggs from the yard.

Broccoli

Mabel playing keep away.

The garden gnome watching over the plants for the evening.

Lets get clean

In an effort to become more self sufficient I have read lots of information on all the ways you can make this possible. While I tend towards jumping in head first when I get excited about things, there is just so much that you can do to change your lifestyle that I can only help but to take this one step at a time.

Part of being more self sufficient to me means making more of less. If I can spend less money on the everyday things, (some things that we have been made to think are necessary) the more money I have to do things like build a new hoop house.

I also am very interested in trying to keep chemicals out of my life as much as possible. You can read endless amounts of information about this on the internet so I wont even get started on that here. Anyways, for cleaning supplies for as long as its been out in my area, I have used Method cleaners. I love them, they smell great and get the job done for me, but yes they do cost about 3 something a bottle. And if you know me you know I like to keep a place clean so that money adds up. So I have done a lot of searching and have whipped up some homemade cleaners with the following ingredients that wont burn holes in your floor. If you buy these things and have them on hand you can clean about anything-

*Borax
*Washing soda
*Vinegar
*Castile soap
*Baking soda
*Lemon juice
*And if you want some scent to things an essential oil in whatever you like best!

Im not going to post the recipes that I used just yet. I want some time to try them out before I go on telling other people what works!

What I will share is an awesome little blend for clothes detergent! I have been using this so I can say it does work and it is so cheap it will knock your dirty socks off. Once finished its less than a penny a load! Really can you imagine picking up a box of 40 load tide for 40 cents, never gonna happen! Heres what you need-

*Borax
*Washing soda
*Bar of ivory soap
*Essential oil if you like
*Five gallon bucket with lid

Set up a pot on the stove and put in five cups of water, use a grater and grate up the bar of ivory soap into the pot. Stir the soap around until it is all dissolved.

Put 3 gallons of water in your bucket and then add in the ivory soap water. Stir this until its all mixed good. Now add 1/2 cup of washing soda and stir it until its all dissolved. Now add a gallon of water. Now pour in a cup of borax and stir that until its all dissolved. Now top off with another almost gallon and stir. Then you can add a few drops of the essential oil for good smellys if you so desire. I used mandarin orange. Leave it sit overnight and it will set up and kind of gel. It wont look normal, it will be kind of snotty looking when you stir it around, this is ok. Remember that it does not have all the added chemicals that would make it nice and smooth. 

Thats it! Use half a cup for each load. You can decant it into something easier for you to sit in your laundry cupboard if you need to. My laundry area is in the basement so i'm going to leave the bucket next to the washer with a measuring cup on the lid. 

In other news, we were at the Hartville flea market again last saturday. Heres what our little set up looked like.

I sold a nice amount of veggies to people, it was really nice to talk to others who appreciated organic growing and things of the like. There were a few who wanted to let us know that I was charging too much, even when I told them what I was selling I seen a few eye rolls. Thats ok, wal mart has plenty of plants for them. Last time an old guy asked me "Why the heck you charging so much for dem eggs??" Always worth a laugh!

Heres mabel enjoying some shade.

And if you would have been there you could have picked up this beauty, what for I have no idea!!

We lost another lady

Sunday evening I noticed that one of the ladies was sitting on the nest for far too long. She had her feathers all puffed up but wasn't producing an egg. In my grand year of owning chickens I have read a lot of information and backyardchickens.com is like a bible, but I am as far from an expert as you can get. The only thing it seemed to be to me is that she was egg-bound. This essentially means that the chicken has an egg stuck inside.

First course of action is to sit them in warm water thats at least a bit over their vent area. You have to keep them in at least 30 minutes to warm up their body and hope that it gets the egg moving along. You can also massage their abdomen to help. Well I couldn't feel the egg in their but wasn't sure what else I could do.

 I set up Mabels dog cage with newspaper covering the bottom and covered it up. I have some of those bean things you put in the microwave to put on your shoulders, so I warmed them up and put them in plastic bags to warm her up a bit. She wasn't moving much at all and she would put her face towards the dark corner of the cage. She ate a bit and drank on monday, I ran to tsc to get some antibiotics that you put in water, in case the egg that was in her broke and was causing an infection. On Tuesday she seemed even more listless and I worried that because she wasn't drinking that the medicine wasn't going to help so we found we should try penicillin. 

It was semi easy for husband to find out what kind of penicillin to get and what dose to give with some google searching. The problem is they really don't sell it for chickens but they do for horses etc, you can use this but in a much much smaller dose. They had it at our local PBS Animal Health. Its called Agricillin, and you keep it in the fridge. They give you the needles that you will need when you buy it. 

So Tuesday afternoon we became home vets, I felt like we were taking care of things ourselves, saving money and doing it the way a farmer would instead of rushing to the vet. (Which I did call, and my vet does see any kind of animal, which is comforting). I was really nervous, i'm not a needles kind of gal so I was a bit queasy. Husband readied the needle and I held lady under my arm with her wings firmly in place so she couldn't squirm. You put the shot in the middle of their breast and from what we read they act like you are killing them on the spot. Well she didn't do this, their was some squeaking of sorts and a bit of movement but overall she didn't fight. 

This didn't resonate well with me, it meant to me that if she was already too weak to put up a fight that our chances of making her better were probably pretty slim. I put her back in the cage and covered her up but moved her into the living room so she could be next to the wood burner nice and comfy. She hadn't ate or drank anymore since the morning i'm sure. I was pretty much expecting what happened when I looked in on Wednesday morning, she had died. 

Husband preformed a necropsy which is the fancy name for animal autopsy. Just enough to see if it was an egg that was causing this problem. Well as soon as he opened her up he seen what looked like scrambled egg yolk. It appears that she laid an egg internally and either before that or during it something got ruptured and the egg crept out into her body. 

All I can hope is that she wasn't in pain and suffering at all. Another day in a life with chickens. If you are thinking about getting chickens don't let things like this stop you. You can't know what will happen, chances are something will along the line somewhere, but it does help you feel like you will be better prepared for the next time. Now we have antibiotics and penicillin on hand, one step closer to being semi-homesteaders. 

In other news we got another huge egg, hopefully our late lady wasn't the one who laid it or else that would be our answer. I'm sure it was our rhode island red. 

And last I will leave you with a picture of Mable reflecting tonight on the days events, she was deeper in thought than me, I was dreaming of where to put the new hoop house...

Third times a charm?!

So I tried again this morning and I couldn't get my pics to upload so i'm on the third try. I have been so busy lately I wanted to update but just couldn't get around to it, not that its that hard?!

I spent a bit of time potting up in the last week, heres a squash that I thought looked cool, all of my squash have super healthy big roots.

Here are the tomatoes that were started the earliest. They are doing well and are looking to get planted soon.

These are all the tomatoes that I will be selling. I started them about 2 weeks after the others.

We think that this is the biggest egg that we have gotten, weighing in at a whopping 3.81 ounces. When we were at the market some guy actually accused me of selling duck eggs as chicken eggs. 

Molly was defending her empty bowl, she was actually growling and barking but they didn't really seem to be deterred. You know you are small when chickens aren't scared of you.

And last but not least here are the finished gourds. We took them to the Hartville flea market on saturday and did pretty good. We will be going back in a couple of weeks with them again and all the plants. Let me know if you would like to purchase one!

We got some good things done over the weekend, good and productive, I will update soon with pictures!

Whatever.

I just went to post a new blog and got some error message and the whole thing was lost. I will redo it later on I must get moving now.